Food Wars

"I cannot bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother. It just means too much to her." Angela Chase, My So-Called Life.

Occasionally I'll get hit with a wave of panic that I'm not feeding my kids enough healthy food. I immediately rush to the grocery store and fill my cart with ground flaxseeds and fish oil and all the fresh produce I can fit into my crisper drawers. I'll buy cookbooks that teach you how to hide hideous vegetable purees in all kinds of food. I once tried to sneak pureed cauliflower into scrambled eggs. That did not go over well.

So tomorrow I'm going to try yet again to get my kids to eat better with something we've tried before with moderate success: blueberry breakfast smoothies on school days. Hopefully it will work, at least until we forget to run the dishwasher one night and the blender is dirty in the morning (I don't do dishes before breakfast), or until the girls spill their tenth purple smoothie on the rug under our kitchen table and I vow never to let them drink another purple liquid inside the house ever again, or until my desire to improve the kids' diets ceases to outweigh my intense early morning laziness.

So we'll see how it goes. Angela Chase was right: It does mean too much to us mothers to watch our kids eat balanced meals.

Written Proof

This post serves as an electronic record that at age 4 and 3/4, Amanda harbored very fond feelings towards her mom. I am saving it for her teen years when other four-letter words begin an inevitable invasion of her lexicon of mother/daughter relations.

Soccer

"Yo, I'm gonna get my soccer on."

After the game:

Me: How'd you like your first soccer game?

Amanda: It was fun.

Me: I heard you got a little upset at one point.

Amanda: Yeah. The other team wasn't letting me kick the ball.

Me: That's the thing about sports, kiddo. The other team isn't going to let you have the ball; you have to just try to take it from them.

Amanda: I know. But they weren't letting me play defense.

Me: The other team doesn't want you to play defense. They want you to get out of their way so they can score. That's the fun part -- trying to play defense even though they don't want you to.

Amanda: But their team is called the Bumblebees.

Me: So?

Amanda: Bumblebees are fast.

Me: Can't argue with that.

Summer 2011 Photo Retrospective

How I Spent My Summer Vacation
(according to the following random photos from my iphone)

New Braunfels! We came, we tubed, we Gristmilled, we covered inflatable boats with sunscreen, we left. And I have this one picture to show for it. Just kidding; there are more, I think. I just can't locate them at the moment.




Buffalo Grille! Our favorite breakfast restaurant has relocated to within walking distance of our house. So now we ride bikes there every Saturday morning. One of my favorite rituals. In the pic below, the girls do their best impersonation of mean biker chicks.



We made funny faces!


We baked!



We golfed.



We went to see our human cousin Amanda and our canine cousin Tessa at the Reliant Park dog show.


Roller skates. I wouldn't say Amanda "roller skated," but she did put them on her feet, and somehow she managed to propel herself forward. A little bit.



Galveston! We went to the beach. Aunt Caroline gave manicures. And we toured Seawolf Park, visiting both the USS Cavalla submarine and the USS Stewart destroyer escort. We were "Griswolding," as Caroline's boyfriend Ward would say.






Blue Bell Creamery! We got a great tour from a surprisingly knowledgeable tour guide, ate free ice cream, and, a bonus -- there is a pretty cool public pool/waterpark less than a mile from the creamery. We'll be doing this field trip again.


We played in the sprinkler in our pajamas.

We had puppet shows, complete with a live studio audience. (See the disrobed barbies below, aka, the live studio audience.)


We visited the Children's Museum a few times.



And..... in late August, we went back to school! Elizabeth goes three days a week, 8:30 - 11:30, and Amanda goes every day, 8:30 - 11:30. On the days when Elizabeth does not get out of the car in the carpool line she says to me, "Mommy, I don't like to stay with you." While this stings a little, I much prefer this rather calm, rational bit of communication to the screaming fits she used to have last year when she wanted to get out of the car with her big sister.

Summer's over, friends!